Movie Review: 'The Brutalist' is a Masterpiece

The Brutalist

Directed by Brady Corbet

Written by Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold

Starring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn

Release Date December 20th, 2024

Published January 1st, 2025

The Brutalist is an unrelenting, haunting, and engrossing film. Brady Corbet’s three hour plus epic follows a holocaust survivor, played by Adrien Brody, who leaves behind his wife in Hungary to establish a life for the two of them in America in the immediate aftermath of World War 2 and the loss of countless family members and friends. Having once been a prominent and well respected architect in Hungary, Brody’s Laszlo Toth will have to start at the bottom in America to rebuild his life and career while finding a place for himself, his wife, Erszebet (Felicity Jones) and their niece, Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) whom they’ve cared for since her parents were killed in a concentration camp.

The story of The Brutalist unfolds in chapters as uncompromising as the rest of the movie. By that I mean the title of each chapter is daunting. The first chapter is titled, 'The Enigma of Arrival' and charts Laszlo’s arrival in America, his being processed through Ellis Island, and his bus journey to Philadelphia where he will be staying with and working for his cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola) and Attila’s wife, Audrey (Emma Laird). His room is a tiny former storage closet hastily converted into a single bed dungeon that opens directly into Attila’s high end furniture store.

The film develops several themes in this chapter including Laszlo’s identity as a Jewish man in America after the horrors of the holocaust, the pressure to assimilate, and the repeated challenge to hide his trauma for the sake of others. Attila, for one, has married a non-Jewish woman and has changed his name to make himself appear more typically American and presses Laszlo to do more to be viewed as American. He gently tries to press Laszlo to further assimilate causing friction between the two. This emerges as they begin a major work project. On top of providing furnishings, the store also offers a service where they will refurbish entire rooms with new everything.

The story of The Brutalist truly gets underway as Laszlo uses the opportunity to refurbish the library of a very rich man, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), to apply his skills as an architect and innovate a minimalist design that is stunning to look at, spare, and elegantly functional. For his part, Van Buren hates the design at first but he comes around. Starting the film’s second chapter, Van Buren becomes not only a fan of Laszlo’s work, but his patron and friend. Via their friendship, Laszlo is able to leave behind his fracturing relationship with Attila and begin a new chapter working as the contracted architect of Van Buren on a massive project dedicated to Van Buren’s mother and his own legacy.

The new job helps Laszlo bring Erszebet and Zsofia to America from Hungary. This introduces new challenges as Erszebet is now wheelchair bound, something she’d not told her husband until she arrived. Nevertheless, she proves to be essential to Laszlo as he launches himself headlong into creating what was first described as a community center but has since evolved into a multi-use space that includes a gym, a library, and eventually, a church. As the project grows more ambitious, the relationship between Van Buren and Laszlo slowly moves to the center before beginning to fracture on the way to a shocking break that sets up the final chapter of the movie.

The Brutalist is a daunting, towering work of art. At 3 hours and 30 minutes, with a welcome intermission, it’s honestly shocking that a movie this ambitious, unrelenting, and often bleak even got made. It’s a testament to the remarkable talent of Brady Corbet that he’s made a film this starkly observant of the craven, self-serving, and reductive aspects of post-World War 2 America that The Brutalist exists at all. This is no crowd pleasing epic, it’s a movie that calls out the ugly side of assimilation and the American dream. The suffering and indignity faced by immigrants seeking the American dream is the beating, aching, battered heart of The Brutalist.

And even as that description is sending casual movie fans in the opposite direction, buying tickets to see Mufasa or Sonic 3, The Brutalist is remarkably absorbing for those willing to give it a chance. The film burrows deep into the consciousness of the audience and when it reaches its shocking third act and stunning final moments, you may be physically exhausted but you will never forget the way that The Brutalist acted upon you. The film is a masterpiece, plain and simple. It’s a near flawless marriage of image and storytelling. It’s a work of art in film construction that also tells a story you will not be able to shake off.

The Brutalist is a massive achievement and the ending of the film is something that will linger in my mind forever. It’s valuable, instructive and historic. The Brutalist may not be based on a true story but it encompasses history in a way that reflects and builds on the real life tragedy of the holocaust and the immigrant struggle in post-war America. The blithe spirit of the ruling class, as represented by Guy Pearce’s extraordinary performance as Harrison Lee Van Buren, gets a much deserved kick in the gut.

The notion of the rich moving into an economic boom period on the backs of a newly arrived immigrant class that narrowly survived a genocide is the pulsing, angry, life-blood of The Brutalist. A holocaust survivor being exploited by a rich man to build a monument to his hubris is a vital, brutally honest, and incisive critique of an overly romanticized period of American history. The Brutalist is a needed thumb in the eye to generations who still pretend post-war America was all white picket fences and economic security.

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